AUGUST 19, 2009

“Death Panels” And Democracy

Earlier this month, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin weighed in on the health reform debate in a Facebook note. Among other things, she said:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

And, a week beforehand, an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily said this:

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

The problem is that neither of these accusations is true. Palin’s assertion has been deemed “false” by The New York Times, the Atlantic, CNN and the Associated Press. Politfact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking arm of the St. Petersburg Times, called the claim a “sci-fi scenario not based in reality”. And, of course, anyone who’s read Hawking’s wonderful A Brief History of Time knows that the physicist is, in fact, British, has lived in Britain his whole life, and is an enrollee in Britain’s National Health Service.

What I’m quickly finding, though, is that the truth content of people’s claims in this volatile debate doesn’t matter much. The “death panel” meme has quickly rocketed around the community of activists opposing Democratic health care reforms and has become the rallying cry for that group. I’ve gotten no less than five chain e-mails from relatives making that claim in the last week. If reform were to fail in Congress this fall, “death panels” would be high on my list of reasons why. And more than one person has made the Stephen Hawking claim to me in private conversation - think of it as a high-brow version of the “death panel”.

As someone who has followed the health reform debate very closely, I am completely, utterly baffled by this. There are many good reasons (reasons not based on lies) to oppose the specific plans Democrats have outlined on how to reform the US health care system. I don’t agree with almost any of them, but disagreement is OK. Being ill-informed on basic facts is not.

I always thought that the internet and the availability of a wealth of information at anyone’s fingers would end the kind of mendacious punditry you see on display here. After all, anyone can very quickly determine that there are no “death panels” in any of the reform bills before Congress. But I think there’s a parallel problem - the internet makes it very difficult for news consumers to separate reliable reporting from rumors and hearsay.

As consumers, we sometimes rely on “signals” to tell us when something is of value - which is why, for instance, banks used to be operated in big, majestic, safe-looking buildings. Signals in the TV news business include attractive anchors, fancy graphics, a busy-looking newsroom behind the anchor - all things that assure us that the source we’re watching is reputable and responsible. But on the internet, the signals of quality information are easy to replicate and in some cases are removed entirely by the medium (as in Facebook, which puts all user information, including notes, in the same format).

I truthfully don’t know what can be done about this problem, and I suspect that even the President’s media advisers don’t either. They’ve created a FAQ-style website to fight some of the more outlandish claims, but I’m not sure sites like these can possibly act fast enough to rebut these rumors that travel through e-mail chains and watercooler conversations. And even if it were possible to rebut the rumors, one by one, to each person who heard them, there’s no guarantee they’d end up changing anyone’s minds. One thing’s for sure - it’ll be very disappointing for everyone if we allow falsehoods to determine the shape of public debate.